The Villiers Touch

“You know better than that.”

He sat back with his drink; his eyelids drooped. An effervescence had begun inside her, and she denied it silently, but it crept through her body, a sultry heat like alcohol in the blood; it made her body feel looser, but it conjured up at the same time an image of rutting sweat and tangled sheets, and that image was all she needed to regain her resistance. She put on a cool smile, an arch look of self-confident control, and she said, “Thank you for not pressing the point. It would have made things disagreeable if you’d forced me to throw you out.”

He put his glass down on the table. “How long has it been since you’ve had a man?”

She blanched; she bridled. “You love taking people by surprise, don’t you?”

“Sometimes it’s the best way to break through to the answers.”

“Your questions can be very crude. That one was. You don’t honestly expect me to answer it?”

“You might have surprised me.”

“I won’t. In any case, it doesn’t matter that much to me. There are some of us who think about other things than sex, hard as that may be for you to believe.”

He only smiled a little and stood up. “Can I freshen your drink?”

“A weak one.”

“I didn’t have it in mind to get you smashed.” He took her glass away, and she put her head back and closed her eyes, listening to the clink of ice cubes as he made the drinks.

When he returned and settled facing her, she opened her eyes and said, “Are you going to tell me about your magnificent coup?”

“Do you want me to?”

“Of course. It’s what you came for, really, isn’t it? To do a little genteel bragging?”

That made him laugh softly, but his eyes didn’t laugh. “Not really. You don’t know much about me, after all, do you?”

“I know you’ve always fascinated me. You’re real, I’ll give you that-the kind of violence and force most people have never remotely tasted and can never understand.”

“But you do?”

“There’s a little of the same thing in me. I’ve met only a very few people who really understand how to enjoy power. Mostly they just go after it because it’s the way they were brought up, it’s part of the value system they’ve always been surrounded by. But they don’t really comprehend it. They make money because everybody approves of you when you make money. Even millionaires-they’re just doing it because it’s a game to play, a way to pass the time. But you’re not like that, I know that much. You don’t really care about money for its own sake, do you? What counts with you is the power to dominate the world. The difference between being kept waiting and keeping others waiting. Doesn’t it come down to that?”

He drank silently, and when his eyes narrowed she had the feeling, in that brief instant, that he was unguarded; something she had said had stripped the carefully crafted armor from him and left him naked before her. She comprehended that in this precise moment she had the absolute power to get total control of him-if only she knew the right method.

He said in an odd, light voice, “It’s fu

The armor had rejoined; the moment was gone; and now she said uncertainly, “I don’t think you’re pleased that I know. It bothers you, doesn’t it? It was your secret.”

Instead of giving her a direct reply, he got onto his feet and went over to the front wall and stood pretending to look at the Ceza

“You told me.”

“Has it occurred to you to wonder why I went out of my way to bring you into this thing? You, rather than someone else, some other company?”

“Of course it has.”

“You haven’t asked. Not once.”

“If I had,” she said, “would you have given me a straight answer?”

He turned to face her. “I will now.”

She kept her face strict and composed.

He said, “You’ll see the beauty in the irony of it. You see, the big coup I mentioned-I’m taking your father’s empire away from him.”

It took a moment for it to sink in. Her face changed slowly as realization came to her.

He said, “It’s intriguing, in an odd way, that you’ll profit from your father’s defeat. It always appealed to me.”

She was stiff, cold; she said in a hoarse breath, “Why?”

“A Freudian nutcracker might say I was raised by nuns and I learned to hate women in positions of executive authority. I doubt it, but it’s as good an excuse as any. Of course, it might be because you turned down my advances. If you think I’m that cheap. Actually, I doubt I could give you a good sensible answer. The design of it, the composition, the balance-that’s what appealed to me from the start. Years ago I went to your father with a deal that would have made him richer and made my fortune. He turned me down flat-not because the deal was no good, but because he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. Me, personally. I wasn’t good enough for Elliot Judd.” He gave her a very quiet, soft little smile and turned his hands over as if to say, You see how it is.

Watching him in horror, she became slowly enraged-flesh aquiver, eyes bulging. She caught herself; she said in a stiff low voice that trembled, “You’ll never do it. My father has hung tougher men than you out to dry!”

“Your father,” he said gently, “won’t live long enough to stop me.”

He strolled unhurriedly to the door, went through it, and pulled it shut behind him.

She walked toward the door woodenly, as stubbornly blind as a wind-up toy; she leaned both arms against the door, and after a while she heard the soft chunk of the elevator door. She went back to the drink she had left by her chair and drained it at a gulp. Then, still moving like a mechanism, she reached for the telephone and dialed the operator and said in a voice that broke, “I want to call Arizona.”

Brian Garfield

Villiers Touch

30. Russell Hastings

By Sunday night the young prisoner was hoarse from the sixty cigarettes he had consumed in the last eight hours. He had chewed his manicure to pieces. The small room was all but empty of furniture; Hastings and Bill Burgess camped hipshot against the spindly wooden table-the room wasn’t designed for sitting.

Steve Wyatt got up after ten minutes’ graveling silence and began to stride back and forth. His eyes were pouched, his clothes punctuated by wrinkles and creases.

The room’s air was thick with heavy body heat. Russ Hastings, stripped down to a rumpled pink shirt, felt tired and angry.

Bill Burgess said, “Nobody’s after your cherry, Wyatt. Why don’t you relax?”

“Why don’t you cool yourself off? You’re melting my butter.”

“We don’t want you, Wyatt. We want the big one. Villiers.”

“Look, I’m nobody’s flunky. Not Villiers’, not anybody’s.”

Hastings drawled mildly, “It’s no time to get contentious, Steve. We’ve got enough documentation to put you away for quite a few years, if the impulse strikes us.”

“Yeah. What other heroic kinds of work do your snoops do besides inspecting the contents of vacuum-cleaner bags and wastebaskets?”

“It netted us your copies of the phony sheets you planted on your employer, didn’t it?”

“Suppose I say somebody must have planted that stuff in my apartment?”

Burgess shrugged. “You could try that on a jury. I don’t think they’d like the fit of it much, but you could try. Now, quite waltzing with us, kid. You can’t afford to-you don’t know how much we know. Go back and sit down, and let’s talk.”